The text of the law is overly broad for the stated purposes of such a law, and flows in only one direction.
I see the media is in a full court press to treat all dissent from this dystopian law as fundamentally based on religion (and they also obscure the actual language and potential implications of the law). My objections depend on science, fact, and truth…and, of course, the health of the people in question.
One example:
Conversion “therapies” that claim to “treat” homosexuality are of course despicable and fraudulent, but laws against them should avoid infringe on basic freedoms like freedom of religion. I haven’t examined the proposed Canadian law in enough detail to have an opinion on whether it is too broad in its scope, but a law preventing people from advertising and profiteering from a fraudulent psychological treatment doesn’t seem necessarily incompatible with freedom of religion.
As for the humbug about relying on “basic biology,” “fact”, and “science”: I have already pointed out, in another thread, that you cannot rely on biology to assert, for instance, that a transgender woman with XY chromosomes is biologically a male. A statement like the following, quoted from an opponent to the Canadian law in the WJ article, is almost certainly scientifically false: “The fact is gender is innate and unchangeable at the moment of conception when the sperm is introduced to the egg.” The brain, no less than chromosomes or body tissue, is also a biological entity, and the evidence points clearly to the possibility of a foetus with XY chromosome developing female brain characteristics. In such a case why choose to emphasise chromosomes and body tissue over prenatal brain development?
Not that I think, by the way, that brain biology at birth should be the final arbiter of what a person’s gender “really” is. The two are clearly linked, but if someone with XY chromosomes and prenatal brain development typical of a foetus with XY chromosomes grows up to identify as a women and presents herself as such, there’s nothing “unscientific” in referring to that person as “her”. To do so doesn’t contradict any scientific facts.
Yes you can, with incredible accuracy.
No, it is a scientific fact.
Even if I pretend that this is scientific or provable (even your language admits that it is not a fact), what is a female brain? What are female brain characteristics? If a man can be a female and vis versa, trying to attribute the characteristics is meaningless.
Of course it does, by definition.
There are men who genuinely believe their lives would be happier if they were women (and vice versa). Within certain limits, you should be free to live your life however you see fit. But hormone therapy and surgery will not make a man a woman, it will just make him or her look like one, usually only to the casual observer. Children shouldn’t be given drugs or undergo surgery to change their apparent gender. I’m not sure at what age gender reassignment surgery should be available, but it’s definitely above 18.
If you decide to live your life as if you were a member of a sex to which you do not biologically belong, please do not ask me to indulge your belief beyond calling you whatever name you’d like me to call you.
They don’t allow gender reassignment surgeries for under 18s, but I do agree with giving a preteen the choice to engage in the use of puberty blockers to allow them to delay the permanent changes associated with puberty until turning 18 to make the choice to commit. It’s completely reversible…otherwise you could…not look like the way you imagine yourself.
And then people look at you funny because you get stuck in an uncanny valley.
I think at the very least, if you ask me, I would do it because I just want to be respectful to people and be nice to them. I feel this is being a bit unnecessarily confrontational.
This is child abuse and should be punishable by law.
No, it’s not.
If they look like a man/woman I would refer to them as such unless in a public forum. In such cases, I would just use the scientifically accurate terminology otherwise you are conceding the entire argument, as well as denying objective reality.
But none of this changes how insane this law is.
Yes they are.
If you stop taking them, puberty begins.
We have active members on this forum as well as one member being a Taiwanese lawmaker that are transgender.
How so? I think the law should protect people’s rights and we should allow people to choose their own future. Having a law that bans such a thing is antithetical to freedom of choice.
Would also like to point out that the website you cited spreads misinformation about what the law actually does.
https://www.parl.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/bill/C-4/third-reading#ID0EGCBA
This is the full text of the law.
I think we should start with the facts and cite the law instead of an article that is written more like an opinion piece. The Western Journal, IMO, is not doing a very good job reporting the facts.
Scans of transgender women’s brains, historical instances of tomboy syndrome linked to prenatal chemical exposure, extensive experimentation with mice, among other things, point to the possibility of brain gender becoming decoupled from body gender (chromosomes, genitalia, etc). Hormonal masculinisation of the brain certainly occurs through a biochemical process different from the rest of the body. I repost here a diagram from Jaak Panksepp’s Affective Neurobiology, a book that discusses in detail the biochemistry of in utero masculinisation of mammalian foetuses:
But once again, putting aside the discussion of in utero brain science, there’re no “scientific” or “factual” reasons preventing one from considering a transgender women a real women on the basis of her psychological identity, social presentation, etc. Stating that a person has certain biological characteristics is a matter of fact/science, but deciding that certain biological facts should determine how a person is considered, referred to, etc. is not.
That you make such a definitive statement shows you’re either not aware of, or ignoring the science.
Currently, yes. But I’ve read many scientists who believe with the pace that technology is moving, that will change in the foreseeable future. They’ve done it in rats and fruitflies.
Umm…I’m going to make one comment and then mute this thread, since so far there’s been nothing but hatred and a contrast to science.
It is not possible to “pray away the gay”, by which I mean that no amount of “conversion therapy” changes the fact that someone who is gay is gunna be gay. Someone who isn’t cisgendered is gunna be not cisgendered. Religious programs to “help” people who don’t fit a narrow segment of society’s idea of “normal” are incredibly mentally abusive — much more mentally and physically abusive than any pushback that someone might get for not being “normal” in society. There have been books written by people who went through such experiences and all of them spent years in mental health therapy trying to recover from the trauma. You don’t see people assigned one sex at birth writing books about the trauma of gender-affirming therapy except for their experience with uneducated assholes like those above who somehow thought it was acceptable to torment them for doing what they thought was right to their body. No one seeks out conversion therapy on their own. They do it only because of pressure to “be normal” because the people around them have successfully abused them into thinking they are “not normal”. But conversion therapy isn’t going to help them. The narrow-minded people around them need to change.
“Religious freedom” is out of control. Your religious beliefs should not dictate what someone else wants to do with their life. A woman getting it on with another woman is not, in ANY way, shape, or form, affecting you and your relationship with your god(s). Nor is someone born with male genitalia that identifies as a woman affecting your religion in any way. I don’t care if you’ve been brainwashed to believe that it’s your mission to “save” them.
It’s not your place to tell other people what to “believe”. Banning abusive “camps” that “save people from themselves” is not a restriction on religious freedom. It’s a restriction on abuse, almost always minors. No one, without being coerced, wakes up and thinks “I don’t want to be gay because in my soul, I know it’s wrong”. They do it because of pressure from people who have convinced them that something is wrong by with them. And that’s not ok when you’re talking about minors. How about we teach people to be tolerant of people who aren’t like us instead?
At least you made it a good one. 
Walter Heyer is wrong with this:
“The fact is gender is innate and unchangeable at the moment of conception when the sperm is introduced to the egg.”
We’d all be female.
That’s one definition of reversible. A normal definition would mean that you will get back to a state of being as if you did not make the change. Your own link admits that there are known and unknown long term affects of taking puberty blockers, which by definition, makes them not “completely reversible”.
From your source:
Possible side effects of GnRH analogue treatment include:
- Injection site swelling
- Weight gain
- Hot flashes
- Headaches
Use of GnRH analogues might also have long-term effects on:
- Growth spurts
- Bone growth and density
- Future fertility — depending on when pubertal blockers are started
Children will likely have their height checked every three months. Your child’s doctor might recommend yearly bone density and bone age tests.
If children with male genitalia begin using GnRH analogues early in puberty, they might not develop enough penile and scrotal skin for certain gender affirming genital surgical procedures, such as penile inversion vaginoplasty. Alternative techniques, however, are available.
In addition, delaying puberty beyond one’s peers can be stressful. Your child might experience lower self-esteem.
Are you sure?
“ Chromosomal sex is determined at the time of fertilization; a chromosome from the sperm cell, either X or Y, fuses with the X chromosome in the egg cell. Gonadal sex refers to the gonads, that is the testis or ovaries, depending on which genes are expressed. Phenotypic sex refers to the structures of the external and internal genitalia.[6]”
To a large extent, I agree with this. Humans behaviors and desires are changeable to a point though. I am not advocating for “praying the gay away”, but when sexuality is a spectrum, there is room to move along that spectrum.
But that’s not what this topic is about. This law is written so broadly that many normal and healthy responses to a child saying s/he is a member of the opposite sex are made illegal.
Well, there are a lot of such books, stories and lawsuits. That you don’t see them says something either about what you choose to look at or what gets censored by our big tech overlords.
https://www.amazon.com/Irreversible-Damage-Transgender-Seducing-Daughters-ebook/dp/B07YL6XK55
No one is making this argument. I’m agnostic, for what it’s worth.
It’s funny that you keep on making this mistake as many people think that accepting different sexual orientations is a safe alternative to transitioning. Anyway, you’re obviously not responding to me, but to something else you’ve seen or heard about a different topic.
We don’t let our children choose what to eat, whether they go to school, or a host of other things in every day life. We certainly shouldn’t let them take drugs which can make them infertile, irreversibly change their genitalia, and which, for many, has severe long term negative psychological effects.
Well, I’ve learned something. For some reason I thought we started off female and then changed into male a few weeks later.
Yes, in that the quote is wrong, as supported by your link - the early embryo is undifferentiated and bipotential.
How about this ?
They scan your brain and they tell you
-
You are an adult and your brain looks like the brain of a 16 year ago kd, therefore you can claim you are 16?
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You are a kid and your brain scan says you are a 22 year old . Are you now legally allowed to do adult stuff?.
That brain equivalency example is weak.